Making an Image into a Usable Web Background.

 Ok, you have this great image and you want to make it the backdrop for your company web page.  Let's pick this one.

Photo of a building.

Beautiful.  But look what happens when you use it as a web backdrop.

OMG you can't read a thing!  So let's try playing with the contrast...

brightness+contrast

 Not this!  It's washed out all the details!  Maybe the levels...

 Closer, but there must be a better way.  And there is!  The problem is that we're thinking like engineers and not artists.  Try this.

Add a layer of White over the top of the image.  Then set the transparency of that layer to about 85%  This trick also works for dark backgrounds, just fill the new layer with black.

...

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Bryan Valencia is a contributing editor and founder of Visual Studio Journey.  He owns and operates Software Services, a web design and hosting company in Manteca, California.

C#.NET Finding the First Day of the Week in One Line of Code

while (myDate.DayOfWeek != DayOfWeek.Sunday) { myDate = myDate.AddDays(-1); }

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Bryan Valencia is a contributing editor and founder of Visual Studio Journey.  He owns and operates Software Services, a web design and hosting company in Manteca, California.

So, I deleted and recreated a dataset in my Visual Studio Project.

Now, the IDE is all banjaxed, and confused.

Note:

My Solution Explorer

 Here is the shiny new dataset in the Solution Explorer.  Now look in my Data Sources pane.

My Data Sources Pane

...and no amount of refreshing, reloading, or rebooting fixes it.

The Solution
This was an odd one to be sure.  but looking at the properties window in the LotTravellerDataset1.xsd, the name property was set to "Dataset1".  Changing this property fixed the issue.

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Bryan Valencia is a contributing editor and founder of Visual Studio Journey.  He owns and operates Software Services, a web design and hosting company in Manteca, California.